First I nurse the realization
That this pain will echo
And in all my attempts to grasp it
And keep it close to my lungs
It weaves itself into my breath
And spills out into the open
Seeping into the damp earth
Whistling between the fog
Sinking among the morning dew
And slowly creeping it’s way close to you
My hands are far too unstable
To offer you some peace
I’d give you my bones and everything
That I thought I could be
I would wrap it in the flowers
That we wished for our garden
But this pain it’s too unpredictable
It leaps away from me
It touches anyone who dares
To give me a moment of their time
and when they tell me they are sorry
We both begin our decline
This grief, she sits at the table
It’s never just you and I
This pain it always echoes
Bouncing between your words
And mine

With a voice that fails me
I aim at the lines between your hope and my despair
With a needle, in an effort to achieve precision
To stitch our thoughts together
They’re so similar, so different
You think of October as a warm home
And I see it as a cold houseguest
And we co-exist in this oblivion
This circle of this or that
I admire your willingness to fill spaces
And you question my fear of being heard
You relish in the colours of fall
And I dread the looming winter
How is it that we left September
Hand-in-hand, wishing for rain...

In the context of things unknown
the leaves have fallen far into these doubts roads I travelled on summer's humid days now pinpricked with touches of gold
wheels blast past,
and the remnants of this past year rustle, there is a mystery in the coolness of this air will winter be one we can still bear?

In the context of things known,
I leave memories of all our growth
under the shade of baring branches
as days go by,
they'll be buried under the delicacies of fall until next year,
when the burden of the snow
has shifted their weight
I'll be back to bury more

This language, everblooming
It has so easily poisoned us
But you dust off those empty phrases
Washing stains out of rageful exchanges
This white flag is half in your hand
And half in mine
A haphazard grocery list
Stopped at tomatoes
Continued as a list of those “we would never go there" words
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,
Written like punctuation in the spills
Now I'm picking up dinner plates off the walls
So many weapons were thrown and old secrets hashed
A mess left with us drowning in the aftermath
I think the salad is now dressed in curses and ill wishes
But despite all that
I think it's your silence that will **** me

This grief changes shapes
It runs and comes back to me in different forms
Sometimes it's angry, sometimes sad
But lately, it's a sweet melancholy
That drifts along with the wind
Carrying the scent of pear trees and spring
It has lost its pain to the December freeze And now, it's a reminder of circularity
And the transience of this little life

I sometimes sit on our old couch in the basement
And think about what we left in its recline
The leather is cold and distant
It is coated with the film of time
Stained with tears, laughter, and secrets Nestled in the crevices is all my growth
When I lay my head against it
1 can hear dialogue from the movies we watched
And faint conversations with ghosts

I've talked to all the ghosts in this room
They speak of memories and grievances
And we revel in how quickly this fog has turned into smoke
It bites at my lungs
And I sit and wait, my eyes on my hands
My ears on the clock
At some point, each passing second
Parallels my heartbeat
There is someone across from me
Saying it is time to let go
But what would be left of me
If this grief vanished, too
At some point, it became all I am

Until you
somehow stumbled into this room
untethering the past from all that I knew